You awake in a nightmarish carnival and watch a golden-haired woman hurl herself down a bottomless well for your sake. You seek clues and help from jeering ravens, an eyeless scribe, a living furnace, a mismade mermaid, and many more who dwell within the park. All the while, a shadow shrieks from atop a towering roller-coaster, and you know that until you destroy this Dark Thing, the woman will keep jumping, falling, and dying, over and over again....
SUMMARY
Strangeland is a classic point-and-click adventure that integrates a compelling narrative with challenging puzzles. For almost a decade, we've been working on a worthy successor to the fan-acclaimed
Primordia, and we are proud, at long last, to share our second game.
Strangeland is a place like no other. Even in the real world, carnivals occupy the twilight territory between the fantastic and the mundane, the alien and the familiar. In their funhouse mirrors, their freaks, and their frauds, we see hideous and haunting reflections of ourselves, and we witness the wonder and horror humanity in just a few tents, circus wagons, dingy booths, and broken down rides.
Strangeland, of course, is most definitely
not the real world. Indeed, figuring out where—and who—you are is one of the game's many mysteries.
As you explore
Strangeland, you will face an array of obstacles armed with unusual weapons and aided by the strangest of allies. Forge a blade from iron stolen from the jaws of a ravenous hound and hone it with a wrath and grief; charm the eye out of a ten-legged teratoma; and ride a giant cicada to the edge of oblivion.... In such a place, death itself has no grip on you, and you will use this slippery immortality to gain an edge over your foes.
Navigating this nightmare of monsters and metaphors will require
understanding of its denizens and its puzzles. Unlike many adventure games that offer a linear experience and single-solution puzzles,
Strangeland lets you pick your own way and own approach—one player might pass a puzzle through sharpshooting, another by electrical engineering; one player might unravel a strange prophet's wordplay while another gathers visual clues scattered throughout the environment. Ultimately,
Strangeland's story will be
your story. You are not the audience; you are the player.
KEY FEATURES
- Approximately five hours of gameplay, replayable thanks to different choices, different puzzle solutions, and different endings
- Breathtaking pixel art in twice Primordia's resolution (640x360—party like it's 1999!)
- Dozens of rooms to explore, with variant versions as the carnival grows ever more surreal
- An eccentric cast, including a sideshow freak, a telepathic starfish, an animatronic fortune-teller, and a trio of masqueraders
- A non-linear design featuring multiple puzzles solutions and multiple endings
- A rich, thematic story about identity, loss, and self-doubt
- Integrated, in-character hint system (optional, of course)
- Hours of developer commentary and an "annotation mode" (providing on-screen explanations for the references woven throughout the game)
CREDO
At Wormwood Studios, we make games out of love—love for the games we've spent our lifetimes playing, love for the games we ourselves create, and love for the players who have made all of the games (those we've played and those we've made) possible. We know that players invest not just their money and time in the games they play, but also their hopes. And we want to make sure that players receive a rich return on that investment—a game that provides not only a fun, challenging diversion for a few hours of playing, but also a lasting memory to take forward (as we have accumulated memories of adventures games from before they had graphics to when they no longer have words).
We think the best way to do that is to adhere to the genius of the adventure genre: the marriage of challenging puzzles and thrilling exploration, on the one hand, with an engaging narrative, on the other. To that, we add uncanny visuals and thought-provoking themes. At the same time, however, we have tried to remove the punitive aspects of adventure games (deaths, dead ends, illogical puzzles, pixel hunting, backtracking, etc.). In
Primordia, this formula seemed to work very well, and we have refined it further with
Strangeland.
Haven't proofed it, but figured before I spent too much time polishing I'd see whether people preferred this approach.
